Friday, May 20, 2005

Review of SW Revenge of the Sith

The final review is in:

It took several days to digest this monster. It is a behemoth of a film. It is the most action packed, and elephantine, of all the Star Wars movies. It is not a movie I would wish to see in IMAX. It was the best of the three prequels. The writing for this film was much better than the other two films and the acting was much better too.
I still think that Hayden Christiansen was not the right actor for the part. He is too boyish, his voice is too highschoolish, and he had no personality. At least not until #3. Finally he has been reanimated, or animated, or something like that. Natilie Portman got the raw end of the deal for this film. There was lots of sedintary scenes of ther waiting. And her death scene, like almost all Star Wars death scenes, is short and anticlimactic. However everyone was more lifelike in this film. Even Mace Windu was less monastically robotic. One huge problem that Lucas has had is that everyone knows how the story has to end. Finally they got it right. Finally they used that glaring problem as a strength and told the story in such a way that brought shivers to the spine. The fight seen between Dukoo, and Skywallker, infront of Palpatine, gave me the creeps. The Emperor steals the show, as well as the Republic.

The problems I had with this film, and the others, was that the background conflict is a nonsensical bunch of crap that nobody really cares about. This is a biiiiiiiiig problem for me. I think that you could still have Palpatine behind the conflict yet make it more understandable. It would only add to the drama. The war in these movies makes Vietnam look clear.
Without a clearly defined conflict for the Clone Wars the battle scenes lose their dramatic effect since you can't care about either side, other that caring for the side Kenobi is on at the time. The addition of a weezing droid general was confusing; how many bad guys do we need?

The problems of this film did not get in the way of it being a good film. I think they could have taken this film, expanded on certain areas, and made Episode II and III out of it. However I am not in a complaining mood. The visuals of this film are spectacular. They are so well done that they cease being visual effects and are simply the Star Wars universe. What a spectacular universe it is. It is a visual triumph. The film also adequately lights the fires of Episode 7 and if people do not think there will be an episode 7 they do not come from Earth, or understand entertainment capitalism.

Big sprawling epics have a couple of drawbacks. In trying to be big and sprawling and epic, personalities often get lost, and reality is often removed as an obsticle to story telling. There are many faults with these films and the main one, beyond casting, and dialogue, etc, is trying to tell too big of a story in too few films. This about The Lord of the Rings trilogy. As big and epic as they appeared, there was a very simple plot, and few characters.

Star Wars morphed from a simple story about "a boy a girl and a universe" into the decline, fall, and eventual rebirth of an entire galactic civilization done in two parts with the end set before the beginning. Holy shit that was a tall order to fill.

It gets a 10 as it crowns the totality of the Star Wars universe.

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